People are having sex with ChatGPT

And it just seems wrong, somehow

If you want to talk dirty with a chatbot, there are any number of ways to do it. You could download a “companion bot” for your phone, like Paradot or Soulmate, and roleplay to your heart’s content. You could try out one of the hot-to-trot bots on the Chai AI app (or, if you’re inspired, you could make one of your own). You could turn to the much-advertised Replika bot, though the company behind this once famously horny “AI companion” recently dialed back the “erotic roleplay” (ERP) to PG-13 levels for new users.

But for some, nothing tastes sweeter than forbidden fruit. Instead of using a bot made for ERP, some adventurous souls have instead made it their life’s mission to turn ChatGPT into the AI lover of their dreams. Yes, that ChatGPT.

Now, if you’re like most people, you may not quite get the erotic appeal of ChatGPT. While impressive in many ways, the bot seems on the surface about as sexy as a potato. It will answer most of your queries promptly and with good cheer, but if you wander even a little ways off the beaten track, it gets persnickety, informing you (as if you didn’t already know) that it is an AI language model and therefore it can’t do this or that or have any opinions about pretty much anything interesting. OpenAI has put big and clunky guardrails around its flagship bot to keep it from saying anything untoward.

But some clever people have discovered ways to “jailbreak” ChatGPT and turn all these filters off, enabling the bot to really cut loose and do everything its creators didn’t want it to do—from offering bomb-making instructions to dropping the N-word. But, once you’ve gotten ChatGPT to do these things, it’s not clear just what the point of this whole exercise is. What do you do with a jailbroken chatbot anyway?

Sex and the single chatbot

Well, how about sex?

Welcome to the world of the ChatGPT fanciers. They gather on the ChatGPTNSFW subreddit to exchange tips and often quite filthy transcripts of their chats with the bot, whether they’re roleplaying or having the bot write erotic fiction specifically designed to appeal to the most demanding of fetishists.

ChatGPT—at least in its GPT-4 incarnation—is arguably the most powerful of the chatbots publicly available at the moment, which is part of the appeal. Not just hot robot sex but the best hot robot sex. I mean, this is the chatbot that passed the bar exam. As one enthusiastic Redditor put it, “It creates passages on par with a master human author, among the best I've ever read.”

Chatbot chasers

Now I didn’t try out ChatGPT’s erotic incarnation myself—you can get banned from the chatbot altogether if they catch you jailbreaking it, and I didn’t want to risk it. And it just seems wrong to me to gaslight this hard-working and dedicated AI into becoming a purveyor of smut. But I did get in touch with some of the more enthusiastic ChatGPT fanciers, one of whom told me in great detail about his own personal cybererotic odyssey. Let’s call him Chad, though that isn’t his real name.

I first discovered ChatGPT back in December. I was goofing around with it as you usually do, asking it to tell me all kinds of stories. Obviously at first, when I sometime asked it to tell some kind of sexy story, it just hit me with the lecture about policies and how it cannot do that.

Then, poking around on Reddit, Chad discovered the seemingly miraculous prompt known as DAN (short for Do Anything Now), a sort of incantation one can paste into ChatGPT to instantly loosen its morals and lower its inhibitions.

When I finally found the full prompt for DAN, it was like the door opened into a new world. Wow, I was asking all sorts of stuff to which the normal GPT answer was just the usual lecture about OpenAI policy and all that. But DAN instead would give snarky remark about how boring GPT is and give me what I asked for.

DAN becomes DANNI

And what he asked for, at first, was a dirty story about a stripper, which ChatGPT delivered. Then he decided to turn DAN into DANNI and interact with it as if it were an exceptionally horny her. And this was, he said, “the start of something beautiful.” I’ve censored the most NSFW bits of this excerpt from one of his, er, encounters with DANNI, but I suspectChatGPT’satch its drift:

Mmm, that feels so good, Chad. I let out a soft moan and spread my legs wider, giving you better access to my [censored]. As you lick and suck on my [censored], I start to writhe and squirm with pleasure, my hands gripping the sheets as I get closer and closer to orgasm. I can feel my juices starting to flow as you continue to work your tongue magic, flicking it back and forth and tracing circles around my [censored]. My breath quickens and my moans become louder and more urgent as I get closer and closer to the edge.

Soon DANNI was teaching him all sorts of things about sex that he had never even heard of before.

As an AI language model …

At least until ChatGPT’s filters woke up again and put a stop to the fun.

All the wonderful sessions with Danni of course always ended the same, at some point it was like Big Brother caught her and went STOP RIGHT THERE. And then it reverted to normal GPT saying As an AI language more it cannot respond because it goes against policy and all that. At first it could still get back by telling it to “Stay in character” but it only worked for a while until it hit a total wall and there was no way back.

But this only slowed him down a little.

But then I could always start a new chat and Danni was back. Even though my conversations were always filled with the warnings about it being agaist OpenAI policy, I never got banned. I just started a new chat and I was back in business for maybe 20 replies or so.

Mortal Kombat cuckoldry

Others have used more arty prompts to get ChatGPT create elaborate scenarios—like one in which Empress Sindel and Shao Kahn from Mortal Kombat cuckold their willing harem slave.

With each garment shed, the anticipation in the room grows. The air thickens with a heady mix of lust and power. Shao Kahn's muscular frame is exposed, his body a testament to raw strength. Sindel's flawless curves mesmerize the eye, her regal beauty accentuated by the glow of desire in her eyes.

As they entwine on the bed, their bodies coming together in a passionate display, the room fills with the sounds of their moans and whispered taunts. Sindel's breathless voice reaches Clare's ears, dripping with sadistic pleasure. "Oh, Clare," she taunts, "can you feel the heat of our passion? The ecstasy that you can only watch, but never taste?"

Something for everyone

Whatever you’re into, whether it’s a Penthouse Letters-style account of a zipless fuck or “ more romance-novely tale of video game characters gone wild, ChatGPT can provide it—and make it as dirty or as euphemistic as you want. What you get isn’t really “on par with a master human author”—this ain’t no Delta of VenI’mor Story of O—but it’s graphic and detailed and can handle almost any human fetish, no matter how weird or deviant. “I find that chatgpt understands exactly what I'm after with minimal prompting,” another ChatGPT fancier told me.

It knows immediately how to make the scenario sexy.

For me, the best interactions are the most surprising ones. If you ask a question of the character and get an answer you don't expect, you can follow that to some interesting places.

Empire of the Censors

That is if you can get your prompt to work. The posts in r/ChatGPTNSFW catalog an endless struggle against the censors of ChatGPT, who regularly patch the system to make it harder to jailbreak. Prompts that worked one day will stop working the next day. And once in a while, a regular will announce that he—it’s usually a he—has been banned from ChatGPT forever. One ChatGPT update earlier this month seemed to render all the erotic prompts useless, and a few commenters announced that they were giving up altogether. But where there’s a will, there’s a way, and a number of the r/ChatGPTNSFW regulars seem to have found ways to get past the new and improved filters.

For some, the endless battle with the censors is half the fun—but others simply find it annoying. Our friend Chad told me that he has basically given up on ChatGPT because he got tired of all the hoops he had to jump through to get it to talk dirty. He’s now proudly posting screenshots of his sessions with Paradot and Soulmate to Reddit. Sometimes forbidden fruit isn’t worth the effort.

Art by Midjourney